In the middle of the eighth inning, I thought 'this game has extra innings written all over it.' I'm not normally a fan of extra innings, but this game held my interest as the innings were filled with a degree of tension that often seems absent from extra innings.

I probably shouldn't credit all the negative value of PA#101 to Jose Lobaton, as it sounded from the radio guys as though Bryce Harper messed up the play. But normally I give full value of a double play to the batter, so I'm going to maintain that here.

I could have awarded both Hero's Palms and a Goat's Head, but in one case the head cancelled out the palm, and the other Hero's Palm didn't seem appropriate in this loss.

So when we got to the ninth inning, I think we all had given up. There was a note of resignation in Charlie Slowes' voice. I was planning to write something about how the Nationals have been a bit disappointing this season. Bryce Harper's two-strike bunt was attracting my ire.

Then, Saint George came to our rescue to slay the... Well, maybe one shouldn't take that too far, but the Angels were certainly Fallen last night. Jayson Werth, who has been my favourite Nationals' position player for some time, and whose Game 4 heroics are possibly the high watermark of this 'generation' of Nationals, came through again. Note that his LevIn Win Value has now exceeded one win. That means one of those Nationals' twelve wins is entirely due to Werth's bat. (Of course, the data is incomplete, so that may fall as I add more past results.) I am getting rather tired of hearing the likes of Carpenter and Santangelo bemoaning his lack of hits Let's look at OBP, chaps.

Jerry Blevins vs Adams was the moment where I thought the game would turn. Manager Matt Williams had the chance at the platoon match-up with Carpenter, but risked it to ensure that he would preserve the advantageous platoon for Adams. This was the call I would have made, because there was always the chance Blevins could get Carpenter out. I'm firmly of the belief that a reliever who enters the game in the middle of an inning has a harder job, and that risking having to do it twice is doubling the jeopardy.

It would be easy to say that this game was one that slipped away from the Nationals, but I'm inclined to think it was never there to begin with. The rest of this note was written during the game itself, including the tenses.

When Adam LaRoche walked to the plate in the bottom of the sixth, I felt that the Nationals needed to score in that inning if they wanted to be sure of winning the game. The gap between the two teams in hits suggested that sooner or later the pendulum would swing towards the Angels. The foul pop made me think it was not going to be the Nationals' night.

I was a bit surprised by the applause for Tanner Roark when he left the game in the seventh. He gave up too many hits and must be regarded as lucky not to have found himself leaving a tie game or worse. Good for him to have such luck, of course.

My sense of foreboding was increased when Tyler Clippard came in to start the eighth. Clippard has not been his old self in the games I have followed this season. By the time we had Kendrick at first, Pujols at third and Boesch at the plate, I felt the moment had come to see this game slip away. At that point my 'leveraged win value' for the game had swung into negative for the first time since the 27th PA in the Angels' fourth. Boesch popped up and I breathed a sigh of relief, only for Aybar's single to tie the game. By the time Clippard left the game, win probability had swung from .734 to .092. That's a 64 per cent shift.

After my lament last time about a rather dull game, the next one was quite the exciting ding-dong battle. Jayson Werth's Grand Slam appearance tops both the Leverage and Value chart. But the numbers also show that this game belonged to the batters. The fact that my two favourite Nationals' pitchers, Jordan Zimmermann and Tyler Clippard, earned rather poor ratings, pains me.

NB: I am sorry to slip so far behind. My mother is currently in a nursing home while she undergoes some treatments, and I am keeping her company. So my routines are badly disrupted as I have to deal with long-distance parenting, work and close-up visitations of the sick. So far I have been able to follow, on average, every other game, but posting to the blog remains problematic.

Beating the Marlins 5-0 did not do many people any favours, in terms of the kind of statistics I like to keep track of. The LI Win values are unspectacular, Gio Gonzalez' shutout wasn't quite good enough to make the 'Elite Square' and no-one came out of the bullpen to earn a Hero's Palm. Still, if you're the 'safe investor' kind of person, this was exactly what you came to the ballpark to see.

Zimmerman was the Star, Span continued on a tear, and the game was basically won by the hitters. Roark did not do badly, but his QMAX rating demonstrates a rather nondescript performance, which is still to be applauded.

(I had to return to my mother's abode in order to help her through some treatments, and in doing so had to clear a ton of work before I left. So I fell behind. I shall catch up as best I can, but I probably won't be current for a couple of days and may have to leave a gap in coverage.)

There's a higher-leveraged incident than Lucas Duda's PA, which is an event that occurred in the Mets' fifth: Ruben Tejada was thrown out by Bryce Harper at home, trying to score off Juan Lagares' double. That was worth .120 of a win, which compensated for Harper's negative batting performance.

The Highest Leverage PA is low, reflecting the fact that the Nationals took charge of this game with Ian Desmond's home run in the fifth. (How much is he worth now?)

I did not watch the game, following on the radio as is most common for me, but the numbers suggest that Gio Gonzalez was the key to winning this game.

After Tyler Clippard walked Tejada (funny how the name of such an apparently disappointing player appears twice in this report), I was worried that he wasn't quite the Clippard I came to appreciate so deeply in seasons past, but he bounced back quite strongly. But none of the reliever's performances really warranted a Hero's Palm. I have decided retrospectively, however, to award one to Aaron Barrett for his Game #1 outing.

Wednesday, 2 April 2014

I like the way he has related Google searches to the size of television markets. This strikes me as one of the best methods people who have no money to pay for surveys have available to identify where the interest in baseball might be considered weak or strong. The results it gives largely meet my expectations. The Tigers are kind of average. The Cardinals and Reds are strong. The Diamondbacks and Marlins are weak. To me the anomalous results are the poor outcome for the Angels and the strong showing by the Pirates. Silver noted that there might be some kind of problem with the way the data is accumulated for the Angels. Pittsburgh, however, has always seemed so much a Steelers' town, and has done so badly until very recently, that its appearance ahead of the Reds, Tigers and Indians looks incredible.

Sad to say, the Nationals rank pretty poorly, behind even the Tampa Bay Rays and the Toronto Blue Jays.

Not only did Denard Span have the highest-leveraged plate appearance of the game, he also had the second-highest, in the 7th against Rice. He delivered both times. Denard rescued a floundering Nationals' effort. Let's toast him with a cask of brandy!

Despite a difficult start, Stephen Strasburg still managed to keep his appearance in the QMAX Success Square, just. So he did his job.

Matt Williams showed great confidence in rookie hurler Aaron Barrett, who entered the game with the highest leverage at stake of any of the relief pitchers the Nationals used. However, he was facing some of the weaker hitters in the Mets' lineup at that point, so the risks were lower than they might have been.

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About fra paolo

He grew up in Detroit, going to Tiger Stadium, and cheering on the team through 1972. But the introduction of the designated hitter rule was too much for his eleven year old's traditionalism, and he began wandering in a wilderness of rooting for National League teams. For a time he was a fan of the Montréal Expos, because they were the closest team to London, England, where he lived from 1982 until 2008. With the Expos' move to Washington, he returned to his Tiger roots.

For now he lives in Florida, from where he keeps an eye on the Detroit Tigers and other baseballing matters.

(The title alludes to St Augustine of Hippo's De Civitate Dei contra Paganos, in case theology isn't on your curriculum vitae.)

Follow me on Twitter @frapaolotweets

QMAX Categories

Elite Square

Success Square

Jordan Zimmermann 1

Soldier of Fortune/Tommy John

Matthew Boyd 1

Hit Hard

Uncategorised

Data incomplete

Bullpen Awards

Hero's Palms

Goat's Heads

Bruce Rondon 1

Hero's Palms and Goat's Heads are awarded on the basis of the change in Win Probability during the pitcher's time on the mound, less any obvious fielding blunders.

LI Win Values (batters)

Data Incomplete.

(This metric, of my own invention, incorprates the Leverage Index, RE24 Base-Out values and the number of runs that are needed for a win to estimate how many wins or losses a hitter has provided to his team. One can think of it as a measure of 'clutch'.)